Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

583082

John Krumm's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/johnkrumm
Bio: I've been participating with Znet and fellow Znuts since the LBBS days in the early nineties. Currently I live in Southeast Alaska, in Juneau. Lately I've been a sort of family house elf, but I'm a... (More)

All Krumm Blogs

This is Hell

By John Krumm at Jan 23, 2008


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I was listening to my favorite radio show This Is Hell today (via podcast) and felt inspired to once again promote it on Znet. The host, Chuck Mertz, seems to interview about a third of Znet's authors, usually in very rare long format, with questions often so good that guest seem suprised and grateful that he read their work so well (unless they get pissed, which only occasionally happens). Northwestern University's newspaper recently did a story on how Mertz has been frustrated trying to make a living as a journalist. He puts in 60 hour weeks for free. Give his show a try if you haven't already. Here's the first part of the story:

It's 8:58 a.m., two minutes until show time and there he is, rushing through the studio door with his graying, shoulder length mane bobbing behind. Chuck Mertz, the host of WNUR's This Is Hell, is a bit late, which is to say right about on schedule. The last show tune from Breakfast With Broadway cuts off and an ambient track fills up the dead air. Mertz darts around, shuffling papers, pulling them up just an inch or two from his door-wedge of a nose so he is able to read the page. For the next few minutes, he is a 45-year-old, legally blind flurry. Then at 9:08, he is seated and ready, script in hand and a bottle of RC Cola at his side.

For nine years, this has been Mertz's Saturday morning ritual. More than 60 hours of his time each week go into planning This Is Hell, a four-hour, current affairs marathon, which he presides over like a Gonzo Charlie Rose, careening between pot jokes, wry observations, dive-bar schtick and serious, long-form interviews. Noam Chomsky has been a guest four times; Howard Zinn, Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Moore have chatted with him on air; so do Hugo Chavez supporters, war reporters and experts on Chicagoland gangs. Guests often speak for up to forty minutes, giving listeners a rare window into their thinking. By many accounts the hard work has made This Is Hell WNUR's flagship show, with a cult audience that, thanks to the web, listens in from Chicago, England, Australia and even Senegal. This would be Mertz's dream job, if only it paid.

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